|
The "vim-slime" plugin is not appropriate for my blog post because it is nothing like SLIME. In fact, the word "slime" in "vim-slime" is poorly chosen. It supports none of the SLIME features. It does not even provide the "connected REPL" experience like SLIME, Slimv, or Vlime does. Here are the major reasons why vim-slime is very limited and insufficient as a Lisp development environment when compared to SLIME, Slimv, or Vlime: - It does not understand s-expressions. It can only send the current text paragraph or text selected in visual mode to a terminal running in GNU Screen, tmux, Neovim, etc. Therefore, it cannot send, say, only the current expression or an entire function definition or a top-level form to the terminal. - Since it is language-agnostic and really only sends text from a buffer to a terminal, it does not care whether the text is code or prose. It also does not care if the terminal is running a Unix shell or a REPL. It is the user's responsibility to ensure that the correct REPL is running on the terminal and the corresponding code is being sent from Vim using vim-slime. - Since it does not implement the client-server architecture that SLIME and Swank implement together, it has none of the interactive debugging features of SLIME. It cannot automatically launch the integrated Slime Debugger (SLDB) when an unhandled condition occurs. As a result, all debugging features like inspecting code, inspecting variables, etc. are missing. - Almost all of the SLIME features are missing from it. It does not support displaying argument lists as we type function calls, Common Lisp HyperSpec (CLHS) lookup and completion, describing symbols, cross-referencing, etc. - It does not provide any key-bindings for common tasks such as macro expansion, function tracing, etc. Swank server is an integral component of SLIME. It is essential to the way SLIME works. A plugin that does not talk to Swank server can hardly be anything like SLIME. Slimv and Vlime on the other hand talk to the same Swank server that SLIME talks to. Slimv and Vlime are re-implementations of the client component of SLIME. They send SLIME commands to Swank just like SLIME does. As a result, Slimv and Vlime are able to support a good portion of the features available in SLIME. |